Increasingly, food retailers and supermarkets in particular require suppliers to provide packs of sliced food products of standard weights. Labelling regulations may permit deviation from the standard weights indicated on packs within narrow tolerances.
It is therefore desirable for food suppliers to aim to provide packs which just meet the associated weight requirements, minimising the extent to which any minimum requirement is exceeded. Any such excess food product included in a pack is often referred to as “give-away”.
In view of the pressure to just satisfy a minimum requirement, groups of slices are occasionally generated by a slicing machine which are slightly below this minimum threshold. In known processing arrangements, these “under-weight” groups are diverted out of the path to the packaging process and to a separate station, sometimes referred to as a “make-weight” station. An operator at the make-weight station adds an additional slice to each under-weight group of slices and then returns the group made up to an acceptable weight with the additional slice into the path to the packaging process.
This process tends to increase give-away, as under-weight packs are likely to fall short of the minimum threshold by an amount less than the weight of an entire additional slice. For example, a slice of bacon may typically weigh 20 g. If an under-weight group of slices only falls short by 2 g, the under-weight group together with an additional slice created at the make-weight station will include a give-away of 18 g. Given the large number of under-weight packs likely to be generated by a processor having a high throughput of food packs, the cumulative give-away is substantial and therefore costly.